The Shadow Debate

“Let me get back to foreign policy,” the moderator Bob Schieffer said, midway through a debate that was, after all, supposed to be devoted to that subject. He didn’t have much luck. President Barack Obama had just spoken at length about education here at home, and Mitt Romney felt a burning desire to defend the honor of fourth and eighth graders in Massachusetts, whose reading and math scores had, he said, been excellent during his tenure as governor. “And then you cut education spending when you came into office!” Obama said, interrupting. As they began arguing about the timing of a scholarship program—“That was actually mine, actually, Mr. President”—Schieffer tried to change the subject to military spending “because we have heard some of this in the other debates.”

We had heard some of it, but not quite like this. Two debates took place in Boca Raton on Monday night, one embedded inside the other. Given that the candidates and moderator had only ninety minutes to work with, the intrusion of domestic issues couldn’t have helped but take away from the foreign-policy discussion. That is a cause for real regret—the world they talked about didn’t extend much beyond the Middle East and China anyway. But taken on its own terms, the second, shadow debate was not a bad one. It was surprisingly detailed, and the exchanges were in some ways more direct than the ones on foreign policy and even more so than previous ones on domestic issues. Despite the assumption that any mention of the economy would be bad for the President, it was also a fight Obama largely controlled. He won a solid victory on foreign policy in large part because he was more coherent than Romney in talking about things that had nothing to do with foreign policy.

The opening statement in the shadow debate came about ten minutes in, when Obama said to Romney that “the nineteen-eighties are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back”—jokes about the eighties are an essential item on any domestic agenda—adding, “you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the nineteen-eighties, just like the social policies of the nineteen-fifties and the economic policies of the nineteen-twenties.” If Romney had been quicker, he might have used the eighties remark to seize the mantle of Ronald Reagan, or to tell Obama that 1979 wanted its foreign policy back—but that would have required a kind of confidence that Romney just didn’t have on Monday night.

How do you turn a foreign-policy debate into a domestic one? First, of course, ignore the moderator—that move has become so old after four debates that it doesn’t even count as sneaky. Second, treat “American strength” as the linchpin in a syllogism that will allow you to talk about anything you want—for example, the industries in swing states. Third, act as though there is no question on the planet that cannot be answered with a promise to teach small children math.

The difference in the debate was that Romney’s education talk was often either defensive (as with Massachusetts schools) or hostile. After Schieffer asked both men for a vision of “America’s role in the world,” one of Romney’s top points was about how “the teachers’ union’s going to have to go behind.” However one feels about teachers’ unions, it’s not clear that undermining them would make us a beacon to other nations. That allowed Obama to set up a discourse in which he was arguing against Romney for smaller class sizes—“I tell you, if you talk to teachers, they will tell you it does make a difference.” This was a running dialogue that began thirty minutes into the debate, and provided the almost comic close to the whole thing, an hour later:

SCHIEFFER: Governor—ROMNEY: But I love teachers. But I want to get our private sector growing, and I know how to do it.SCHIEFFER: I think we all love teachers. (Laughter.) Gentlemen, thank you so much for a very vigorous debate.

This was supposedly in answer to a question about Chinese currency.

Because Romney’s one great foreign-policy theme, once he had conceded many of the specifics to the President, was the need, as he said, “to project leadership around the world,” he spoke of a number of domestic issues in terms of how they looked to others—when “Ahmadinejad, says that our debt makes us not a great country, that’s a frightening thing”—rather than how they were lived by Americans. This reinforced the impression that the dilemmas of American families are abstractions to Romney. Trying to draw a contrast between his plans and the President’s on defense spending, Romney ended up being more frank than he has been elsewhere about his willingness to cut the domestic programs many rely on or value, and to trade Medicaid (“which is a program for the poor,” he noted) for block grants to states: “There are a number of things that sound good but, frankly, we just can’t afford them…. We take program after program that we don’t absolutely have to have and we get rid of them.”

Romney, too, tended to introduce ordinary people in a way that made them sound pitiable—“Ann was with someone just the other day that was just weeping about not being able to get work”—while Obama talked about “a veteran in Minnesota” and how he had been a medic but, with a little help, could have a career as a nurse. That led him to Michelle’s work with a group, Joining Forces, that helps veterans get jobs: “veterans’ unemployment is actually now lower than general population.” This was in the section about Afghanistan. Veterans, and “nation building at home,” were a route away from talk of war that Obama used several times, and that Romney neglected. One of Obama’s great tricks was to turn the question of soldiers into a domestic issue by focussing on the social programs that help veterans.

All of this was, in a way, a prelude to the confrontation that served as the climax of the debate: the auto bailout. The final section of the debate was about China, although it was clear that the geographic area of most interest contained the Midwestern states that benefited from the auto bailout. After disposing of a Romney soliloquy on counterfeit valves with a line that he really should have used at a key moment in the domestic-policy debate—“You are familiar with jobs being shipped overseas, because you invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas”—Obama went full-out on how he’d saved domestic auto manufacturing when Romney wanted the industry to go bankrupt with nothing but encouragement to look for private loans to carry on.

But I’ve made a different bet on American workers. You know, if we had taken your advice, Governor Romney, about our auto industry, we’d be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China.

Denying what he had clearly said about the auto manufacturers, Romney looked evasive, and unreliable. His counterargument didn’t extend much beyond saying “I like cars.” Obama had all but won the debate much earlier, but this may have been the moment when he won something even more useful: the state of Ohio.

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